The Bruce Murray Space Image Library
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NASA / JPL / SSI / processing by Gordan Ugarkovic
The rings are either too tenuous to scatter enough light to Cassini's cameras, or the material that they are made of does not scatter light as effectively as Saturn's dusty rings. Faint horizontal streaks in the background are stars, which appear streaked due to the long exposure. The background of the image is slightly brightened; this probably represents E ring material scattering light to the cameras. A diagonal line running across the sunlit limb is a diffraction pattern from within the optics of ISS, caused by the saturation of the sunlit limb during the extremely long exposure.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For uses not allowed by that license, contact us to request publication permission from the copyright holder: Gordan Ugarkovic
Original image data dated on or about January 19, 2006
Explore related images: Cassini, pretty pictures, planetary rings, Rhea, amateur image processing, Saturn's moons
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